I’ve been working on a series for Amazon the last several months, and I’ve had some great opportunities to evolve and refine technique. This one is a variation of an older post that I did explaining how I like to use Absolute Presets for sets.
We had several stages where we would want known starting points, but we knew we were going to start with something in order to change it. Since I didn’t want to risk updating the Preset itself by accident, I felt it was smartest to store Presets, but Absolute. But how I was recording them was not ideal. I was making two mistakes:
- I recorded the Preset, then I changed it to Absolute.
- Since we weren’t building a cue, the only things I stored were Presets.
Make a “Dummy” Cue
What I feel now is a much better work flow is to assign a cue number to anything you work on with the Gaffer/DP. Why? Well, it allows you to go back to earlier values if they discard an idea without using Undo and if they never told you they wanted to save something (it happened a few times later in our process), it means you have a record of at least how your preflight ended. It also allows you to use things like Select Manual and other conveniences since you have committed your Manual values to a cue (or cues).
Make an Empty Absolute Preset FIRST
The other thing I will use forever is making my empty Presets in blind, and immediately changing them to be Absolute BEFORE recording data into them. When you record a Preset in Eos, all the labels cover the values. In theater, that’s fine. In a Prelight, where I’m constantly being asked what values are, pressing Data over and over again becomes a hinderance (as does locking the Data button on, since it obscures useful things like what Color Palette we are in). But when you tell the Preset it’s Absolute before recording the values, you don’t get the labels all over your data. It allows you to record with the same work flow that you’ll use the preset in the future. For me, this was so much easier.
Anybody have some favorite workflow improvements they’ve recently discovered? I’d love to hear about them in the comments.
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Mark LaPierre is a programmer in film, television and theater based out of Albuquerque. He grew up in live entertainment and has been a designer/programmer for musicals, concert dance, live music, circus and corporate. Mark is a proud member of IATSE Local 28 and 480, an ETC Eos trainer and an enthusiastic trainer of many other platforms and subjects. He offers remote console coaching in 30 minute to 4 hour times as well as a full range of training in person. If you enjoy his content, please consider commenting on his posts on the website to appease the Algorithm.